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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Package Day

Any day gets better when it becomes Package Day!

First: backing fabric for my new quilt

Confession time: I am a FEROCIOUSLY lazy quilter. So any quilt that requires more than 1 seam for the back I usually just buy a piece of extra wide fabric and trim it to size, as opposed to piecing together lots of smaller pieces of fabric.

The quilt in question is 80" square, so the back will be a single piece of the new 108" wide green fabric, and the leftovers that I trim off will be the binding.

Quilting friends are coming over this Thursday to help me baste it.

One word of caution when using extra wide (108 or 110") backing fabric:

WASH IT BEFORE USING

I don't generally prewash my quilting fabrics but the large/wide cuts can shrink up to 7-8%, not something you want to contend with after the quilt is completed.

After I picked out the backing fabric and put it in my cart at Fabric.com, I was faced with a moral dilemma: Should I pay $6.95 shipping for the green fabric, or buy another yard of fabric, thus qualifying the order for free shipping?

I think I made the right decision! That pretty poppy print is "Poppy Modern" from Andover Fabrics. The Kona solid in Charcoal is from my stash, and will be perfect with it!

1 comment:

So glad you mentioned about the washing of backing fabric BEFORE quilting it. I recently had a 120" wide muslin shrink 11 inches in the width. It created a big problem because the top was 117".I think you did the right thing to buy another yard of fabric and get free shipping. That's a quilter thinking!!